Copyright NBC News
With the government shutdown now poised to end, it’s clear Republicans are in worse shape politically now than when it started. The question is whether that will prove to be temporary — as has been the case with past funding showdowns — or if the political atmosphere has been reset in a way that will linger into next year’s midterm elections. As the six-week shutdown played out, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating ebbed to the lowest point of his second term, with a majority of voters pinning the blame on him and Republicans in Congress. Democrats opened up a wide lead in the generic congressional ballot — 8 points in our NBC News poll, a level last seen in the run-up to the “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms. And then there was last Tuesday, when Democrats posted an unexpected landslide in New Jersey, a state where both parties saw the gubernatorial contest as competitive and recent elections had suggested Republican momentum. Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s victory was so staggering that it lifted a host of down-ballot Democrats and gave the party its largest state Assembly majority in a half-century. The Democratic rout was even bigger in Virginia: The party’s deeply flawed candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, coasted easily on the coattails of Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger. An unpopular president, a wide generic ballot gap and off-year election results like this are all early warning signals of a midterm debacle for Republicans. But they have been here before. And in two previous shutdowns, Republicans saw their public standing buckle only for it to recover in its aftermath. This was the case during President Barack Obama’s second term, when a dispute over funding for Obamacare precipitated a government shutdown that started on Oct. 1, 2013, and lasted for several weeks. Like now, the public sided squarely against the GOP. An NBC News poll at the time showed voters blamed congressional Republicans over Obama by a 22-point margin. Like now, Republicans suddenly found themselves 8 points behind on the generic ballot. And like now, there was apparent fallout in that year’s elections, with Democrat Terry McAuliffe narrowly defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli in the Virginia governor’s race. Cuccinelli had liabilities as a candidate, but 2013 stands as the so the shutdown drama of late 1995, a collision between the Republican Congress, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and President Bill Clinton. And the public’s verdict was clear: They blamed the GOP. The political legacy of that 1995 shutdown is complicated. Clinton’s standing did improve, while Gingrich’s fell to a level from which he never fully recovered. It also established a framework for Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign, when he presented himself as a middle-of-the-road bulwark against the ideological fervor of congressional Republicans and Gingrich himself. Clinton ended up breezing to victory over Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas in one of the least suspenseful presidential campaigns of modern times. But critically, most of the political benefits that Clinton reaped didn’t extend to the rest of his party. During the shutdown, Democrats opened a sizable lead on the generic congressional ballot, but the gap narrowed again by early 1996. It fluctuated as the year progressed, but ultimately Republicans lost only four House seats — even as Clinton won the popular vote by 8 points. The 1996 election marked the first time since 1928 that a GOP House majority lasted more than a single term. With the current shutdown seemingly at its end, the hope for Republicans is that over the next month, polling will return to its pre-shutdown levels — meaning a bump in Trump’s approval rating and a tightening of the generic ballot. The GOP would still face some serious 2026 headwinds, with the economy remaining a top concern to voters and Trump receiving poor marks for his handling of it (not to mention the history of the president’s party struggling in midterms). Still, through a combination of the Democratic Party’s own image problem and the new congressional maps Republicans are drawing in some states, they would conceivably have a chance to hold their own. But that’s only if the shutdown effect proves to be temporary. If the political environment stays like this — or gets worse — Republicans could be staring at a wipeout.
